Edmund Morgan
Edmund Sears Morgan (b. January 17, 1916, in Minneapolis), an eminent authority on early American history, is Professor of History emeritus at Yale University (1955-1986.) He has written many books covering a range of topics in the history of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, using intellectual, social, biographical and political history approaches. The books include Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won Columbia University's Bancroft Prize in American History in 1989, and American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), which won the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, the Southern Historical Association's Charles S. Sydnor Prize and the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award. Two of his early books, Birth of the Republic (1956) and The Puritan Dilemma (1958), have for decades been required reading in many undergraduate history courses. He has written biographies of Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams, Benjamin Franklin.
In 1971 he was awarded the Yale Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa's William Clyde DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching and scholarship, considered one of the most prestigious teaching prizes for Yale faculty. One year later, he became the first recipient of the Douglass Adair Memorial Award for scholarship in early American history, and in 1986 he received the Distinguished Scholar Award of the American Historical Association. He has also won numerous fellowships and garnered a number of honorary degrees and named lectureships. He became a Sterling Professor, one of Yale's highest distinctions, in 1965. Morgan was awarded the 2000 National Humanities Medal by the US President Bill Clinton at a ceremony for "extraordinary contributions to American cultural life and thought." In 2006, he received a Pulitzer Prize "for a creative and deeply influential body of work as an American historian that spans the last half century." [1]
Morgan's own interest in history grew while he attended Belmont Hill School outside of Boston, and while he was an undergraduate at Harvard, where he went on to earn his Ph.D in 1942. At Harvard Morgan studied under Perry Miller. He began by teaching at the University of Chicago (1945-46) and then at Brown (1946-55) before becoming a professor at Yale.
Books
- Virginians at Home: Family Life in the Eighteenth Century (1952)
- The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (1953), with Helen M. Morgan
- The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (1956)
- The Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (1958)
- The American Revolution: A Review of Changing Interpretations (1958)
- The Mirror of the Indian (1958)
- Editor, Prologue to the Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764-1766 (1959)
- The National Experience: A History of the United States (1963) coauthor of textbook; several editions
- Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (1963)
- Editor, The Founding of Massachusetts: Historians and the Sources (1964)
- The American Revolution: Two Centuries of Interpretation (1965)
- Puritan Political Ideas, 1558-1794 (1965)
- The Diary of Michael Wigglesworth, 1653-1657: The Conscience of a Puritan (1965)
- The Puritan Family (1966)
- Roger Williams: The Church and the State (1967)
- So What about History? (1969)
- American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975)
- The Meaning of Independence: John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson (1976)
- The Genius of George Washington (1980)
- The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (1984)
- Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988)
- Benjamin Franklin (2002)
- The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America (2004), collected articles and reviews
Reference
- John M. Murrin. "Edmund S. Morgan," in Robert Allen Rutland, ed. Clio's Favorites: Leading Historians of the United States, 1945-2000 U of Missouri Press. (2000) pp 126-137